Shares in Wise fell about 10% on Friday after the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency declined the money-transfer firm’s application for a national trust bank charter, the licence that would have wired it directly into the Federal Reserve’s payment systems.
The London-headquartered fintech, which listed on Nasdaq in May, had spent more than a year chasing the approval.
The rejection shuts off, for now, the most ambitious part of Wise’s American strategy. A national trust charter would have let it settle dollar payments directly with the Fed rather than routing them through partner banks, the sort of infrastructure prize that rivals such as Klarna have also pursued in the US.
Wise applied to the OCC in June 2025 to set up Wise National Trust, a non-depository bank based in Austin, Texas.
The plan, as the company laid out, was to pair the charter with a master account at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and clear US dollars directly, including through real-time rails like FedNow.
